Venice: The Smashing Machine provides an impressive but low-key star vehicle for Dwayne Johnson

Just as the Coen Brothers’ filmmaking partnership has broken up in the 2020’s, so have the Safdie Brothers, arguably the most exciting US filmmakers to hit the scene in the previous decade. It’s a chance for admirers to play a game of analysis by way of subtraction; with Benny and Josh Safdie’s first solo features about to be unveiled in this autumn’s awards season, we can assess which sibling brought exactly what to their febrile, energetic breakthroughs, Uncut Gems and Good Time. 

With Benny having picked up middleweight Hollywood acting roles, most notably in Oppenheimer, and showing a more sedate demeanour than his brother, might he have a less forceful, provocative filmmaking personality? The evidence is there in his Venice competition premiere The Smashing Machine, a sports drama of a traditional shape and design, but made out of several idiosyncratic elements.

The mainstream box office star Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson also feels like the film’s prime creative mover: with the ex-wrestler also taking a producer credit, The Smashing Machine is a calculated attempt for Johnson to finally have an Oscar-friendly role perfectly attuned to his physicality and charisma, although it’s far above a vanity project, which would otherwise give him a role he isn’t suited for, or that his reputation doesn’t warrant.

Johnson incarnates the mixed martial arts fighter Mark Kerr, little-known beyond fans of the sport up to now. An ex-professional wrestler like the actor portraying him, he’s noteworthy for being one of the first in his field to succeed in this new, dangerous hybrid of previous combat sports - where, say, a wrestler can face off in the ring against someone from a more traditional martial arts background, or from the Japanese Sumo tradition, given its early popularity in that country.

Safdie maintains the natural, observational approach of his previous films especially in his camerawork, tracking his eccentric characters through various garishly designed locations, as they cogitate, worry, and over-estimate themselves.  Yet the formulaic dictates of commercial sports movies still dominate: the rise, fall and rise again; the supportive but sidelined partner (an underused Emily Blunt); the redemptive comeback match. There’s a strong underlying focus on the danger of committing your life to this bloodsport, with Kerr falling to a debilitating painkiller addiction, and an acknowledgement of the self-inflicted violence it visits on the competitor and his wider personal life. But this more serious inflection can only cut so deep, because it wants us to celebrate and bask in just how awesome Johnson is, to a much larger degree.